- MCJ: How Ireland ended up staying Catholic. More.
- Takimag: The care and breeding of docile students.
- The Jewish question. Takimag’s Jim Goad asks:
- Are Jews members of an ethnic tribe or members of a religion? If the latter, how do you explain Jewish atheists? What exactly is a “Semite,” and why does the term “anti-Semitism” seem to embrace people who appear to be of Eastern European derivation while it tends to exclude Arabs and other indigenous Middle Easterners?
- If you’re so secure that the evidence surrounding the Holocaust is irrefutable, then why jail people who question the evidence? Why does the Western media feel compelled to mention the Holocaust almost daily while it routinely ignores the 30-50 million non-Jewish civilians — not soldiers, but civilians — who were killed in World War II? Were their lives not nearly as important?
- Why are certain “right-wing” writers brave enough to criticize communism, open immigration, the liberal media, and political correctness while they’re mortified to even consider that Jews were often the primary architects behind such movements — or at least disproportionately represented?
- Isn’t the idea of “God’s Chosen People” cosmically racist and supremacist? Is the Talmud not hostile to goyim? Haven’t the Jews historically been racially separatist, all while accusing other groups of “racism”?
- Is it even remotely possible that Jewish behavior, rather than a murkily mystical and ultimately unprovable notion such as “anti-Semitism,” sometimes led to negative perceptions about Jews? Even once throughout history?
- In a European Union document calling for “equal treatment between persons irrespective of racial or ethnic origin,” why does it urge that we should focus “in particular” on “anti-Semitism” if everyone is to be treated equally?
- Why does our current cultural climate allow one to decry “white privilege” but never “Jewish privilege,” especially since Jews are undeniably overrepresented statistically when it comes to wealth and power?
- At the moment, Israel and some of its enemies are lobbing missiles at one another. Why should I care about Israel? Why should I deem this dubiously founded and eternally disruptive nation so important that it’s worth starting World War III, shoveling out tax dollars, and enduring much of the world’s wrath to protect it? What do I get out of the deal?
- Damian Thompson: Anglo-Catholics, your time is up. They were around in the ’70s and ’80s to teach me high church when local Catholics wanted nothing to do with it; thanks. The good ones are now in the church, actually being what they were long taken to be. I don’t follow the rest of it, largely out of respect for freedom of religion.
Don't apologize for things you didn't do, to people who don't believe in forgiveness or redemption.
Monday, November 19, 2012
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If you had told them about actual Protestant doctrines, the Gaelic Irish during Henry's Reformation would likely be even less favorably disposed toward them than the Old English who spearheaded the Counter-Reformation in Ireland, but they also were utterly incapable of organizing any kind of effective resistance, and were more interested in nursing their grudges against each other and saving their own skins than in standing up for abstract religious principles that they didn't understand very well anyway (superstition being rampant and religious education being a shambles). Most people don't realize that, before Bloody Bess and Oliver Cromwell pacified Ireland and brought it into the modern world through the time-honored technique of mass extermination, Gaelic Ireland was an awful lot like modern Somalia (in fairness, neither modern Somalia nor medieval Ireland were nearly as bad for most ordinary people as is commonly believed- one point anarchists do have in their favor). The Church there never had much success in stamping out consanguineous marriages, which created the intense in-group loyalty that preserves tribal cohesion and prevents wider cohesion. It was easy for Henry to get the Gaelic Irish to do his bidding with a little bribery and by inflaming old grudges- classic Divide and Conquer.
ReplyDeleteI have the vague impression that the unassimilated Old English of the Pale, on the other hand, were a classic Marcher people- living on an ethnic frontier and faced with hostility from another people, they developed stronger internal discipline and unity. That may be part of the reason they were able to mount effective, organized resistance to the Reformation. The English language was also much less isolated from European developments than the far-flung and little-known Irish Gaelic, so the Old English were able to take full advantage of all the rhetorical ammunition coming from the continent, along with the continentally-trained priests and religious who carried it.